Steam Charts: Taxidermy Edition

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A lot of people have tried to argue over the years that it’s simply impossible to collate the top ten selling games on Steam from the last week, and then write a small comment accompanying each, beneath a screenshot. But today, for the first time, we hope to prove those people wrong.

What can’t I tell you about Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet?! That’s the real question here!!! I mean, I know so much about Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet that (28 words, only 28?) I could talk your socks off about it all day!

Where to start, where toooo sttaarrrrrrttttt. Well, I suppose I could begin by explaining a bit of the history of the Sword At Online series, which of course dates back all the way to the… oh wait, I don’t have a word count on these! Next!

My plan is to be credited for things I’ve had nothing to do with nor even knew were ever going to exist long after I’m dead. Come the moment of my gruesome demise, should the rest of the world/universe survive, then I will insist that reviews keep getting published as if written by me. “John Walker’s Wot I Think Of Force Commander 2”. “John Walker’s Review Of I’m Bored Of This Joke Now.”

This comes a-stomping romping roaring back into the charts after a week at one-third of its regular price, and will charge back out again now it’s back up to the eye-watering $60/£50 they somehow regularly charge.

Here’s my idea, and you can have it for free, developers. Everyone’s jolly cross right now because Hunt’s servers are in an old mess, and people can barely get access to a game. But goodness me, which was the last multiplayer game launch that wasn’t like that? It’s never happened.

People might suggest ideas like improving servers, server code, etc, but really, you think a company like Crytek wasn’t trying that already? No, the answer is simple, and for it we must reach back to the Olden Days. To the Commodore 64.

Are you already with me? The good readers are. C64 games took a million hours to load from their cassette tapes, but some had the brilliant idea of a space invaders game you could play while the main game was loading! Invade-A-Load it was called. I’m just saying…

Okay, so here’s the thing. Thanks to Trump’s recent necrophiliac humping of the previously long-dead “violent games cause violence” debate, that unscientific tedium was wrung through the media once more last week. There is not a shred of credible evidence to show that game violence can cause a non-violent person to develop violent behaviour, and all previous press attempts to link a game to a mass shooting have been proven to be entirely fatuous, and often outright lies.

But do we want to take a risk that we’re definitely right about this when it comes to ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO BLOW UP ENTIRE PLANETS?

That’s what the latest Stellaris update offers, and you know what, I’ve not heard a peep about this from the hypocritical press, and Donald Trumps hasn’t even tweeted about it once.

A lot of people have been questioning the historical authenticity of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, after it was discovered that Smithy Probst of Smingsgard, an NPC who offers a quest relating to finding the location of a missing colour, has a bolt on his armour’s breastplate that is 13 degrees rotated too far to the right for the era. Obviously the developers have apologised and offered complete refunds to anyone whose lives have been adversely affected, but I would like to point out that, once again, people are forgetting the possibilities of time travel.

Just because your history book says something is one way, who’s to say that time travel won’t be invented in 2228, and that a time traveller went back to the era to finally settle the debate over the ethnicity of the region. And even though she tried so carefully not to change anything, still accidentally distracted an armourologist during his construction of a chest plate?

Except that doesn’t make any sense at all, because if you bothered to think about it just a little bit more, you’d realise that were she to have done this, the version of events she created would be the historically recognised record that we experience today. And as such, the game’s incorrect inclusion would not be reflective of the time traveller’s antics, and thus is stupid and wrong.

And let’s say it’s for that reason that you shouldn’t give this game your money.

There’s a faint pressure in choosing a song each week, wanting not to appear too uncool and the like. So with that in mind, here is the song I listen to the most often every time I drive my son anywhere, and don’t mind one bit, and we do the drums until we nearly crash.

The Steam Charts are compiled via Steam’s internal charts of the highest grossing games on Steam over the previous week.

John, that was a perfect explanation into Sword Art Online. I feel like I can now understand it a bit more thanks to you. Also Im sure someone will still take umbrage with some part of your reviews even after your dead.

We just need a few of the know it all smart alec commenters on the web of the world to change their login ID’s to Jon Walker after he passes, and his legacy can live on. What? You’re name has an “h” in it? Nope, I don’t do silent letters, sorry bud.

Stop hating on Kingdom Come. It’s an excellent game that is doing well, as it should, because most sane people don’t care about the views of one developer (even the head one) on a whole team of people who worked hard on this game. Sorry the game wasn’t “diverse” enough for you, but is that really reason to hate on it? You’re only keeping yourself from enjoying an excellent game.

But it wasn’t simply a joke, because this is pretty much the same opinion expressed in RPS’s review of the game. Every time they mention it, they hate on it because of such minor gripes that really don’t have anything to do with whether or not it is a good game.

“And what are these new players in for? ‘Hours of tedium’ according to our review!”

I am often surprised by how much certain gamers seem to genuinely enjoy hours and hours of tedium. See: every game with crafting and/or XP that isn’t Minecraft, and also Minecraft outside of creative mode.

On the subject of gaming and death, I recently suggested in a Steam discussion* on Subnautica that it should have an ‘Ultra-ultra-hardcore mode’ whereby if you die in the game, you die in real life. I posited that if that was the case, I would just stand in the fire at the very beginning of the game.

*Yes, I went there of my own volition, knowing full well that I could possibly end up getting cancer. Again.

The political stuff biasing reviews of KCD is irritating. I wish I could find out from somewhere whether it’s actually a good game, without having to wonder whether the person is biased one way or the other.

I confess the irrational urge to chuckle a bit at the thought of some old and venerated seicento-armourer being dragged before a tribunal of his guilds´ peers, convened under the brilliant whiteness of a meticulous rendition of a doric temple, cast at their feet, awaiting stern judgement for turning a bolt thirteen degrees too much, thus violating ancient mysteriae of the armourers´ guild, culminating in the forfeiture of his officina dell´armatura, being stripped of his tools and cast out into the wild to go working for …the germans. Just because he let himself become distracted by a blundering time-traveller. And all that for naught, to boot, because her blundering will make accepted history. A thought that will surely warm our old maestro during cold nights with “le tedeschi”.